Get Better Insight with DataSelf BI Based Reporting - webinar 202311

Alrighty, so let's get started. Good morning, good afternoon or good night. I know some people are from multiple locations across the planet or the globe. Today we're going to be talking about get better insights with Data Self BI based reporting. My name is Johnny Giorardi. I'm Data Self's founder and CEO. I'm a big data geek. I've been working with this industry for about 20 years. I was a software engineer in my early career, became a business person and 20 years ago I started this journey of helping decision makers make more informed decisions. Primarily what I've been helping in is pretty much what we're going to be looking at today is how to address two main issues. One is decision makers frustration that they have the data but they usually can't get actionable insights from their data anytime, anywhere. So that's one of the frustrations that we've been working on. The second is decision business analysts that are working super hard to keep up with decision maker requests for new KPIs and refresh KPIs so giving them better tools to get their job. So that's my introduction, Tom.

Hello everyone, Tom Fitzpatrick, I'm a BI solution engineer with Dataself. I'll be performing the demo for you today and I'm generally the first person that you'll speak to if you should see value in moving forward with Dataself. I'll work with you throughout the sales process demoing the product for you from today should you see the value. I think it's important to note that we can have a follow up discussion to really understand more of your priorities and pains as it relates to reporting efforts and then we can provide a tailored demo for you. So happy to help in any way possible to help you make more informed, better data driven decisions.

Thank you Tom. So let's move forward here. We're going to be spending about five, 10 minutes talking about income, informed decisions and challenges around it. Then we'll jump into a demo showing BI based reporting and how business users can take advantage of it. After the demo we're going to be kind of discussing ERP versus BI based reporting, the main differences and then towards the end of this presentation we'll talk specifically how Data Self tackles BI based reporting. So first of all, there we go, the main challenges of decision makers when they, they complain that you know, their reports are not, not there. One of the most common is what they call just being slow to get their key performance indicators. And slow can be, you know, I need to run it right now. And it might take too long. You know, we usually we tell 10 seconds is pretty much what people are patient enough to wait for a computer to respond. If it takes longer than 10 seconds, you pretty much, you lose people. So can be just talking about short period of time or some complaint that they're always managing their business looking at the rear view mirror. Their KPIs are always kind of outdated. And the second thing is when the decision maker has question about a different perspective that is not ready on a report, they got to call the data experts and wait until the data experts can come up with new reports and dashboards. So these are the main complaints of decision makers. I have the data, but why, why, why, why can I get insights anytime and anywhere? When you look at the business analysts, the people that actually support decision makers, the main challenge that they complain is reports. Dashboards is very time consuming. They spend a lot of times refreshing, exporting data, manipulating data. There's a lot of repetitive tasks. Many people, they work pretty much every week and every month doing the same work over and over and over to refresh the reports and you know, validate the data and distribute the reports to people. And overall things are slow in nowadays people are not very patient when it comes to, you know, slow things. So those are, those are the two main high level challenges for business analysts and decision makers. And why people have these challenges? Well, primarily because most companies, they use what they call standard reporting. Standard reporting is usually the reporting tools that come with your digital systems, your erp, your CRM, your payroll, your, your Google Analytics, all of them, they have built in reporting tools and also, you know, easy to export to Excel. In both of these approaches we call that they are focused on operational reporting or transactional in what you're doing pretty much today. So if you're only looking at a small data set, it's fast and maybe you get the answers quickly. But as you start to looking into bigger pictures, you want to see trends, you want to see major KPIs. It becomes complex to build these reports. Sometimes it takes a long time to run them and sometimes it might take hours or days for people to actually get the KPIs assembled using export, Excel and whatnot. When the decision maker wants to slice and dice the data doing ad hoc analysis, quite often they can't or it's just impossible, they gotta call someone else. And there's not a lot of things that are automated, there's a lot of labor associated to get information to decision makers using standard reporting. Those are just the Limitations. You know, you're focusing what you're doing today but when you're looking at management, reporting is limited. And that's why there is what's called BI based reporting. BI based means business intelligence based reporting. It's a platform that works on top of the digital systems. So it's to complement what comes with the digital system. And the focus is providing decision makers with strategic, predictive and performance based reporting. It's easy to use. You know, decision makers can actually look at their KPIs anytime, anywhere. It runs super fast. They can do what's called unlimited ad hoc analysis. I mean they can drill down, drill down, drill across and there's no limit. It's easy and they can do it without calling the experts in overall, discover that BI based reporting has functionality that can automate the majority of the reporting tasks. So people can focus on analyzing data in less timing, prepping the data for analysis. So it's a different platform in a nutshell, some people like to say the standard reporting is what you're doing kind of today. So it's very critical for today's operations for the staff. While BI based reporting is how you're doing pretty much management wants to see how you're doing and find the outliers. At the end of the day when you have BI based reporting, decision makers will have their KPIs timely daily, weekly, monthly, whatever it is. And it's easy to do ad hoc analysis when you find an outlier. Something really great, something really bad, what's happening, what's causing this and being able to find the reason behind the outliers. And for business analysts, database reporting provides an easy yet a powerful better reporting platform. You can automate the majority of the repetitive tasks that people do. It's alerts driven, meaning if something goes wrong, you can notify something is not working and things run really fast. So all of this functionality helps business analysts to be a lot more productive. That in mind, I'll let now Tom take over to show the demo of the BI based reporting. So right now we're pretty much showing, we're going to be showing what the business user experience is when they're using BI based reporting. We're going to be showing how data self works. That's what Tom's going to be focusing on. However, if you were to be building any kind of BI based reporting is the same functionality overall and, and then we'll talk later how data self makes database reporting easier, better and faster.

Tom, very good Johnny. If you could stop sharing so I can. Thank you very much. Alrighty. So you should all be seeing my data self screen, the slicer sales invoice slicer.

Yep.

Great. All right, so before we get started, just want to let you know we're going to be spending the next 15 to 20 minutes just demoing some of the more popular reporting templates that our business users interact with to self service their business needs. Now the majority of the templates that I'm going to be showing you today, they are focused towards sales. But I think it is important to note that just because the templates that I'm showing you today are geared towards sales, it doesn't mean that those templates don't extend into other business areas like inventory, finance, A.R.A.P. and so forth. Now we do have purpose built templates for those specific areas as well, but I only have about 20 minutes to demo this product. I don't want to demo all hundreds to thousands of reporting templates that we have, nor do I think you really want to sit and watch me do that. So I was limited to only the the top three to four for our demonstration today. Okay. So I think overall a good outcome is just understanding the general concepts, the flexibility, the speed, the ease and the power that these reports, these reporting templates are going to offer you so that you can self service your business needs and make more informed business decisions. And as I mentioned earlier, should you see the value after our demonstration today, please reach out to either myself to Johnny, to your value added reseller or your var get, let's get connected and let's understand more about your specific business, what you need from a reporting standpoint, how we can help ultimately take your business, your BI reporting to the next level. Okay, so with all of that said, where we're going to start is our sales invoice slicer. Now this is a template, this is our slicer template. And as the name would indicate, this is where I'm going to be able to very easily slice and dice my data. So this is, we like to joke that this slicer is like an Excel pivot table on steroids. So probably the majority, if not all of you on this call right now at one point or another have had to do manual data dumps where you've exported the data, dumped it into Excel and then you've gone through all these hoops to manipulate the and massage the data for your specific needs. The nice thing about data self in this slicer reporting template is this is going to be automatically refreshed. Okay? This data is going to be Pre crunched through our SQL Server so that you don't have to go through those manual manipulations. And then just through simple point and click functionality, I'm going to be able to create a report visual based off of what I need based on my specific business needs. Okay, so I'll show you an ex, an example of that in just a second. But just to go over the general groundwork or the lay of of this slicer reporting template, on the right hand side you can see our financial years, we can see the financial periods. So this is where I can just simply point and click. So if I wanted to do a comparative analysis, I could select 2021 and view my 2021 and 2022 sales data for periods four and five. Okay, over here, this is where right now we're seeing our sales invoice slicer by customer. So we're looking at our sales data by customer. If I select this dropdown here, let's say I wanted to see my sales by salesperson. I'm simply just going to select salesperson. And in our second or two now I'm seeing sales by my salesperson. Okay, now just to spend a quick moment here on this dropdown here, this is a default list. We would be able to help you add additional data points that you would need for reporting to this drop down list. Or we could do that for you. Okay, so there's a couple options there. Again, we are looking at this from a sales perspective, but this report template could be used in a lot of other areas as well. A lot of different other use cases as well. Okay, so we're seeing our sales buy, our salesperson, let's say, hey, I want to expand on this more. Let's click this plus sign. It's going to expand this column out. I'll select the dropdown. Maybe I want to see sales by salesperson, by item. Simply point and click, I'll see my item. Okay, and we can see that data automatically flow through. Maybe now I want to see my sales by salesperson, by item, by customer. Expand this column out, select the dropdown, choose customer. And now I'm, I'm seeing my sales by salesperson, by item, by customer again, all of this automatically refreshed, automatically flowing into the system. No longer are you going to have to do any manual manipulations which I'm sure at one point or another you've tried or have or currently are creating a report similar to what we're viewing here. Now I am looking at just the metrics, my sales metrics here but if I select this dropdown I'm going to have a list of other metrics that I could report on. Again this is just a default list. We would be able to help you or you could add any other data points that you may need. But this is going to be a multi select. So this is where I could add maybe the cost of sales to this. Maybe I want to see the profit or the gross margin. Our quantity solds this year, prior year data, any variances. I'm just going to select quantity sold here and apply just to show you what this looks like here. And you can see instantly and accurately it's going to pull in that quantity sold for periods four and five in 2022. Okay, so again this slicer is going to allow you to very quickly and easily slice and dice manipulate your data for any ad hoc analysis purposes. Nice thing is which I'll show in our next reporting template. You are going to be able to save any configurations that you make to these templates. Okay so once you've maybe this started what started as an ad hoc report for you now may want to become a regularly run. So maybe every week or every month and so forth you can save this. So it just becomes part of your normal process. Again that data always refreshed and automated for you. Johnny, anything you'd like to add or complement to what we've already discussed on the slicer?

Yeah, the slicer is one of the examples of how decision makers become more independent. If you look at what Tom just did in this quick presentation, it's pretty much ad hoc analysis. You know he just started from selecting some periods selecting a slicer in this case salesperson and you drill down into items and customer in a certain direction. BI based reporting is a tool that you know, no matter what you do, you may be the controller, you might be in inventory planning, you may be manufacturing, in project accounting. Many times decision makers just need to do this. Start from the high level and start to to drill down into different pockets of the data. And quite often we hear people telling well if the report is not ready I gotta call someone else or if I have the report and I click refresh to run it at every single drill down it takes too long here what Tom just showed is that this is always available, it's always ready to go. And as you drill down, no matter how much data you have, the result comes in seconds. And this kind of functionality in our client base is the fifth most used functionality across all the clients. Meaning it's a very popular feature. Because decision makers need to find answer to their questions without calling someone else. And this live stream is a very popular one. So even though bi based reporting is usually people who think about the dashboards, the flashy, the charts and whatnot, the reality is many people just need their plain vanilla grades where they can just drill down to the details. And this is an example of how the base reporting helps them. Back to you.

Thanks Johnny. So next, what I'd like to get into is our natural language query template. And this is one of the easiest templates to run within data self. The nice thing about this template here is as long as I know how to formulate sentences and speak in English, I'm going to be able to run this report. So consider this a gift from us to you that you're going to have at least one reporting template that you can feel confident that by the end of today's presentation you can self service your reporting needs or at least some of them. It isn't a magic wand, but natural language query does work very similar to like Google, which I'm sure you all have used. So in Google, you know, you ask Google a question, it's going to search the Internet, it's going to pull up a list of web pages based on that search. Natural language query works in a very similar way except instead of searching the Internet, it's going to search your data and then it's going to spin up a report based on what you've asked. Okay, so here I'm simply going to type in sales by salesperson in 2022. Okay. And you can see as I was typing it started to query my data up at the top. Once I have my question or what I want to report on formulated at this point, I can simply hit enter or select submit. And here you can see instantly and accurately it's created a report that previously did not exist just through plain English asking a question. So here we can see our sales by our salespeople represented in a descending bar chart in 2022. Okay, now let's say, hey, I want to add on, add on to this. I want to see this broken down by by month. Simply just going to come up to the top here. Enter by month, select enter. And now I'm seeing my sales by my salespeople represented in these colorful line graphs by month in 2022. Okay, now this looks great. This is a great visual, maybe something that you can, you know, print out and put on a dashboard or have for a sales sales meeting with the executives. But let's Say I wanted to see the actual raw data behind this. What I could do is simply select this drop down here, select text table and now I'm seeing a visual very consistent with that Excel view of from a row and column standpoint. Okay, so here we're seeing our sales data by our salespeople broken up by month in 2022. And as I mentioned earlier, let's say this. What started as a basic ad hoc inquiry that I asked within our natural language query. Maybe I want this to stay become a part of my normal set of reports that I want to run. By selecting this view original here down at the bottom, this is where I would be able to save this view so that I don't have to keep asking this question over and over again. I can save this. It's going to become part of my template set. I could make this my default. So when I log into data self, this is the first report I view. I can make this visible to others should others within my organization have value in this report that I've created. So again, a lot of flexibility and ease in terms of creating the report and then saving and distributing it. One way of distributing it to others within the organization. You could also have some of these templates set up on automatic emails to others within the organization as well. Okay Johnny, anything you'd like to add in terms of the natural language query?

Yeah, this part of the functionality also available from BI based reporting is the whole thing that now people Talk about the ChatGPT Artificial intelligence, machine learning, helping users get information out of digital systems. So that's the kind of technology, behind the scenes kind of reading what a human is asking in plain English. Right now English is the only language supported. But then you put the question and the tool will give the answer. Like Tom said, it's not a magic wand. You need to know how to articulate the question, which many times people don't. So we have found so far that actually between the slicer that Tom showed before in this functionality, the slicer is actually more popular because it's more structured and it's easier to get what you're looking for. And people using natural language query.

You.

Know, many times, particularly the questions, think about something else to get an answer that is not correct. They think the computer is getting wrong and actually the question was wrong. The question is not well articulated. So natural language query, artificial intelligence, ChatGPT has a huge future. As this technology becomes smarter, you will help get the answers or ask the person exactly what you mean by this question and eventually it's going to become amazingly powerful, but it's a journey. Right now I only know a smaller number of companies using it, but they are very successful with it. Amazing technology for ad hoc analysis if you know how to ask the questions correctly and clearly. Back to you Tom.

Great. So we've shown an example of just basic plain English asking a question and having it render a report. For me, we've shown an example of what you would be used to if you do a lot of your reporting in Excel. Now we want to show you what an example or an iteration of a reporting template from a dashboarding perspective or what you would expect from BI based reporting. So we're going to go into our year over year template here. Now this is our year over year variances by sales. Again this could be configured for other areas beyond sales, inventory, financials to name a few. Now this report or this dashboarding template can look like a lot at first glance it is a relatively sophisticated report. So just want to spend a minute or two just unpacking and telling you the vision behind this particular dashboard. So what we've found is that certain business users or groups of business users, they really only care about a few, a small set of KPIs key performance indicators. But they do monitor and track those KPIs, whether that's daily, weekly, monthly, what have you. Okay. And within those KPIs they want to be able to see, hey, show me where I'm doing very very well or where I'm not doing so well. Okay. And then allow me to drill into those outliers through simple click on and drill through functionality to understand the why something might be happening. Okay. And that's really what this dashboard achieves is being able to quickly highlight or for you to visual easily see visually where those outliers lie and then drill down into to understand a little bit more about your business so you that you can make more immediate business based decisions. Okay. So on the left hand side here we're seeing a bar chart this year prior year color coded as well as the variances. Just below that we can see a trend line graph over time from a sales perspective. I can also geographically see how well we're performing based on our customers in the various states of the U.S. if you're an international company we could have this expanded to a global view as well. Now what we're seeing here is anything in black, that's where sales are up, anything in red, sales are down. And then on the right hand side we're seeing more of that raw data. So the customer prior year, this year in the variance as well as the items prior year, this year in the variance. Okay, so let's just take Texas as our example here. Texas, just hovering over my cursor over Texas, we're seeing that it's currently experiencing a 2% sales growth. But when I select Texas, now what happens is now I'm only seeing data for my Texas customers.

Okay.

And very quickly I can see that my top customer in particular, again wanting to see those outliers, my top customer is experiencing a rather significant decline in sales. Little over 400,000 in sales. So I want to understand, hey, why is this happening? Why are we having suffering such a large decline on this customer? So I'm going to click on that customer. And again now this dashboard's only showing me data for this particular customer. And right away down into my items, I can see that it's these four items that are driving the decline in terms of our sales. Okay. So with what we initially saw at a high level, big picture company wide, Texas had a 2% growth. It wasn't until we actually started drilling down that this particular customer has a 8% decline. Okay. Which is driving, which is ultimately leading to that performance being lower than what, what it could be. Now let's say I want to actually drill down into the details of these items. I can simply highlight these, these top four and then show me the details.

Okay.

And then it's going to give me access or visibility into all of the transactional data this year, prior year for those items that were sold from that customer.

Okay.

So again, this dashboard is just one iteration, but ultimately where you're going to be able to achieve that, click on drill through ability where you can see at a big picture and then drill down into the granular details to really understand what, why certain things are happening within your organization. Johnny, anything you'd like to compliment, given.

The mic, I'll stick it. Yeah. I mean to me, many people, when they hear about business intelligence, they think about dashboards, kind of this kind of functionality, know the charts and the bubbles and whatnot. But to me, the biggest value of BI is the interactivity that provides decision makers what they're looking for and what are they looking for. They're looking for KPIs at the right time, at the right location and allow them to see what's going on. Like Tom showed here, he started with the KPI with the dashboard showing a bunch of KPIs. This could be looking at the hourly, daily, weekly, monthly Ad hoc doesn't matter. People, decision makers, they want to see the KPIs and when they see something, an outlier, something intriguing, something really good or really bad, they want to know the why. And then they want to start to drill down and slowly but surely find the most underlying fact that is causing that outlier. And in this example, at every single click that Tom did, he changed the view significantly and he went to a point where he went down to the details, but that's not the limit. In a BI based solution like this one, you could go and drill across, he'd kind of drilled down from the top revenue KPIs and he went drilled down all the way to the most detailed level. But then you could start drilling across. I want to see open orders, I want to see quantity on hand, I want to see receivables, I want to see something related to this data, maybe something related that is in Google Analytics. I want to see how many times this customer has been visiting our website. I want to see some social media seeds into this customer with bi. Because BI based reporting can bring all the data into the BI solution and link the data in a way that decision makers wants to navigate from the top level all the way to the most granular level, no matter where the data is, and do this in seconds, no matter how much data you have without calling the data experts. Ad hoc analysis is the most important value for decision makers. And this is one example of how BI based reporting can enable that. Back to you.

Great, thank you, Johnny. So the last template that I want to highlight here is going to be our cash flow projection. So we did just want to give you at least one example of a financial dashboard, a financial visual. And this particular template has really been gaining a lot of momentum within the last year. And I think a lot of that has to do with the overall financial uncertainty of Are we in a recession? Are we not in a recession? Are we in a recession? Are we not? But what this template does is it ultimately allows you to see where your money is, your cash on hand today, and then be able to forecast out into the future based off of money coming in or money going out and then be able to see where your cash will be at any point into the future. Okay, so just to unpack this dashboard for you here we can see this green line or this green column here. This is our cash on hand today. On top of that is our blue, this is our ar. The orange, this is going to be our ap. And the red is our payroll. Okay, so the money coming in, the money coming out. And then this black line here, this is going to be just the flow of where your cash is going to be at any point in time on these particular days into the future. Okay, in the right hand side here, these due dates, this is where you're going to be able to set that time frame. Right now it's set to about 45 days. You can set that as far as you'd like out into the future. But ultimately what we're capturing here is based on the due dates of those AR invoices and AP bills. That's, that's the data that we're capturing and that we can forecast. Now this particular dashboard template here, you could add additional data points as well. So if you have loans or any other items that you would like from a cash flow, Cash Flow Projection Incorporated, we could certainly do that as well. But again, this just gives you a nice overall picture, a visual picture as, as to where you are from a cash flow standpoint at any point into the future. And then on the right hand side again is going to be the actual raw data. So where I can see my transaction types. So the AP bills, the AR invoices, those actual, the documents. So what those invoice numbers are the, the actual balances on those invoices. So I could simply, if I wanted to just highlight this particular date and now it's only going to show me those, that data on the right hand side. Okay, so very valuable report just from a cash flow perspective. Cash flow forecasting within data self. Okay. And with that I will hand the mic back over to Johnny.

Yeah, and keep still on the screen. This dashboard, this dashboard is a little bit on the finance side of the business. Usually controller, CFOs, they really appreciate cash flow analysis and cash flow projection. Actually cash flow projection, it's usually a fairly time consuming job because when people are doing it properly, they have to pull data from multiple locations in their system. In their system like now they're open ar, the open ap, their payroll, their loan payments, their recurring, you know, bills and revenues. And there's usually also some adjustments to be made. And quite often when people do this, they do it in Excel and they usually do it like once a week or once a month. It is usually time consuming, is error prone. With BI based reporting which is primarily using a data warehouse behind the scenes you can get all the data sets that feed into the cash flow projection automatically, just automatically on schedule. All the data is put together in this modelware like showing here on the Right. You have the raw data showing all the transaction details. And then you can use BI charts in ways to plot information visually so you can just see the outliers. And also if you have lots of data, you can also use statistical models to project numbers based on, let's say what happened last year around this time when it comes to sales that I don't have in my system yet, looking at open sales orders, looking at transaction, my website. So there are many ways you can put predictable models into this framework to have a better visibility into potential of your cash flow projection. And these were looking from a cash flow standpoint, which again is good for CFOs and people looking cash flow. But the same kind of engine, the same kind of capabilities can be looking to other part of the business. Like you just want to project your sales. For instance, if you are a sales driven organization, predicting what's going to happen, sales is usually a big concern. You know, is it going up, is it going down and why and what can be changing in this model? Or if you are dealing with products, inventory planning, you know, projecting what's going to happen with your inventory on hand, are you going to run out of it? How much do you want to keep? You don't want to want to keep too much, not too little. So there's a lot of different reporting areas where this kind of analytics can help you be a lot more informed. And we're just showing you one perspective here, which is a cash flow, but this goes across multiple different areas. All right Tom, thank you. All right Tom, thank you very much for the nice presentation by the way. I've been answering several questions on the questions and answer panel. So if you have questions or if you want to double check what people have been asking the answers, feel free to click the Q and A button on the Zoom control panel so you can also ask your own questions or see what other people are inquiring. All right, so what Tom showed, he showed data, self analytics. But the whole concept of what we're showing here is what's called BI based reporting. What is BI based reporting? So let me go to the next slide. BI based reporting is business intelligence leveraging data warehousing behind the scenes. Business intelligence is already a fairly common term in mid sized companies. I see many companies working with business intelligence and I hear many of them struggling on getting BI to deliver on the promise of BI being easy, being fast, being automated. And many people struggle with that. And the reason is usually because people are not leveraging a data warehouse as a way to do what the data warehouse can do really well. A data warehouse is primarily a database. Can be a SQL database, can be a MySQL can be Oracle, can be any database, but it's a database where you copy the raw data from your transaction systems like your erp, your CRM, your payroll, your Google Analytics, your social media, anything into that database. And now all of this data from different digital systems that are telling what is happening with your business. But it's all your business, your customers, they have multiple touch points with you. Maybe they go to your website and you have Google Analytics looking at them, then they go to your CRM and you have opportunities with them. And then you have eventually invoices and shipments and all of this data, they can be in different data silos, but they're all the same business. In the data warehouse you can actually connect easily all of these data points to have a single entity, like a customer, like a vendor, all the touch points of this entity with your digital systems and consolidate this data in a way that a database can do the job really well. And then when you automate all of these processes of bringing the data together, then is when you can use tools like even Excel, Tableau, Power, BI, QlikView and whatnot. These visualization tools, they can really shine once you have the data warehouse behind the scenes. BI based reporting is BI with the power of data warehousing. And that's what you pretty much you saw today. You saw the user interface, but behind the scenes you have a data warehouse making the process work more efficiently. Now this is a generic concept. How does Data Self do it? How Data Self delivers on BI based reporting. So let's now focus specifically on data self technology. We have two main options to help organizations getting better database reporting. Some companies, they already have pretty good expertise in BI like Tableau, Power, BI, QlikView and whatnot. And sometimes they struggle because they don't have a data warehousing. I know some people here in this audience is one example that they have full capabilities on the BI side and then we help them on the data warehousing side. More technical, but we can only fix that part of the problem. Providing an amazing data warehousing framework in option two, which is actually the most popular one that we support so far, is what Tom showed. Option two is the full blown data self solution that comes with the data warehousing. With etl, with a bunch of things that you don't have to start UBI from scratch, you have a fairly well matured solution on day one. And then you take it over, you customize it the way that you want. Let's just take a quick look into both options. Option one again is a more technical one. Primarily you can have different data sources and I'm listing here some of these data sources that we already have a lot of the integration, Akumatica, Sage, Infor, Microsoft, Netsuite and some others. We actually support over 200 different data sources that you might have. Then the idea is we use the Data Self ETL plus ETL stands for extraction, transformation and load. It means it will take the raw data from your digital systems, loads easily, automatically on schedule into a SQL Server data warehouse. Can be the cloud, can be on premises, can be behind the firewall. Doesn't matter where SQL is, but it does this process very efficiently and very quickly. And then you can use your own reporting tools. So people say no, Crystal is not great. Well, it depends how you use crystal. Crystal has very good value, but doesn't matter. You can use the new reporting tools to report out of the data warehouse, knowing that the data will be automatically refreshed and transformed using etl, which is a no code, low code, full code if you let me. This is my universe. I like Data Pipeline Universe, but I know it's fairly technical, it's not very popular yet for many clients. So let me move to the next option which is the option number two, which we call the fast track. Your business intelligence based reporting. This is what you just saw from what Tom was showing. It provides what we call this three step process. It has a data warehouse built, plug and play. Super simple to get started, but amazing, powerful and you can control everything in it. You can control what tables you want to import, what fields are going to be import, what data source you're going to be poured, how you're going to massage the data. All of these things can be controlled by you. Depending you get the modules that you can customize the back end, but you don't have to. About half of our clients, they never touch the data warehouse because it's either out of the box from Data Self, pretty comprehensive, or they use someone like Data Self to do this kind of one off customization the back end. Anyhow, an amazing technology for BI based reporting. Step two, we leverage Tableau Power, BI and Excel. These are the three tools we use the most for our clients. We also support other tools, but these are the most popular and if you don't know them, they are easy, they're fast and they are amazingly empowered for decision makers. And that's What Tom showed today, actually Tom showed tableau. Even though Power BI works in a very similar manner in the third and quite often one of the biggest values is out of the box. On day one we have about 8,000 reports and dashboards that can be deployed out of your digital systems like Sage, your Akumatica, Netsuite, Microsoft Dynamics and whatnot. So you don't start with your BI based reporting with a blank sheet. There's ap, there's ar, there's a lot of things ready to go, pretty much not ready to go. But on day one primarily got 80% of your BI solution ready on day one and then you take it over to customize the remaining 20%. So that's the main value is having a bunch of things kind of, you know, plug and play. This page shows briefly the kind of modules we have for ERP and CRM. If you look by different ERP system that we support, there's a lot of out of the box templates. It doesn't mean that you cannot have anything else. Of course once you get Data Self, let's say if you have Dynamics BC and you want to have AP analysis, it doesn't mean you cannot do it, it just means it starts from scratch. While if you have a checkbox, it means it's part of the 8,000 reports and dashboards KPIs we have available. So part of the value again that I mentioned is allowing people to start with their BI projects done extensively on day one because of these templates. In a nutshell, we say that Data Cell solves reporting challenges fast and for good. Primarily because we bring tools, you know, pretty much enterprise grade, an enterprise grade BI platform, data warehousing, etl, Tableau, Power BI and Excel. The templates is a big part of the value. And then if you need support, services, training, customizations on the BI side, sometimes many people don't have that expertise, you know, for training or for the work. And we provide so tools Templates in Professional Services is the big package that many of our clients take advantage of to accelerate their BI based reporting and address reporting challenges. We are in Our year end 2023 pretty much is over and we have some very aggressive promotions going on. If you see some value in what you learned today or if you already have Data Self and you're considering adding more users, more capacity, contact us. You know, you can contact Tom myself or just email salesata self.com we can see specifically what you're looking for and see what kind of discounts we can bring in and help you hopefully close the budget and go into 2024 with better visibility into your business. With that in mind, we're going to open for questions. Let me just go over here. We had a lot of questions on the Q and A box. Let me just go over a few of them and keep on answering more questions. I'm going to be addressing. We have a few minutes. Oh, Eric is asking if we can do email subscription for saved reports. That's the point that you know, if you have a report in data self, no matter how we got there, but you have a report over there, can the user or the administrator per se configure the system to automatically email their report on a certain schedule? Absolutely, yes. Both the admin user will control what rights each user or group of people have. But one of the beauties of this is let users decide what they want, when they want. So let's say if I'm the decision maker and I wanted to receive, let's say the casual projection that Tom was showing and I want to see it every week or every month, let the user go to the report, click the subscription button, select who should be receiving this email. Maybe just a person, maybe they want to add some other people in the team and how often and you just put in the schedule daily, hourly, weekly, monthly. And once you press subscribe, that's it, moving forward automatically on schedule. Their report will be refreshed and emailed to the people that the person have configured. So it's very straightforward to let users subscribe the reports by themselves. So one question here is if the natural language query reports can be saved and exported. Yes they can. When Tom was showing, he actually showed that he can click and save the report. So next time people don't have to start from scratch. I don't know exactly how you can right now if you can save it in different locations. In a BI solution you usually can save your reports in certain containers. Right now I don't remember exactly how that works but usually the good news is the security around BI based reporting is very granular. You can define what a user can do, what they cannot do and usually if they can save and where can they save their own reports. So there's a lot of power in where people can configure in the system. More questions here. A nice comment from Carmen. There are so many reports that I can think of for Sage 100 using this over gristle reports. It's way more effective and fast from what I can see. I was one in your training classes a while back. And I'm very impressed with how the product is growing. Carmen, thanks for the feedback. One question here is please talk about where the data is accessed and would I remain control over my data? So what is the data in? Do I have control? Absolutely. With Data Self we call our solution like a Lego block approach. You decide which components of the Lego block you want. If you want everything, you just get everything. If you want everything in the cloud so you don't have to install anything, usually there's the option or you can move the Lego blocks. You just pick what Lego blocks you want and where to put them. Typically, dataset can be fully in the cloud. I mean if you have your source system behind the firewall, then we need to extract the data locally. But the data warehouse, the web server can be all in our cloud. We have AWS and Azure as the main cloud providers. We or on the opposite side, you can have the whole Data Self solution behind a firewall, everything, nothing, complete control. And usually when clients come to us with their own specific needs, we discuss why they want those specific needs. You know, sometimes they don't know certain options that can change what they're looking for. And then we can tailor the pricing of Data Self based on the specific needs and provide them with tools, templates and support. So absolutely you have access to the whole data and you have control to the whole data. You just have to choose what Lego blocks you want in, where you want them deployed. Another question from Carmen. We are recording the session, I believe we are is supposed to be recording automatically and we're going to be emailing the recording tomorrow. That's the plan. Lot more questions, so question from Eric. If we're going to be leveraging the Microsoft fabric as well as the OneLake storage, we are working on both of them. So stay tuned for news. Does one have to select a blue Power BI or can you utilize both through the Data Self offering using best of your templates from media analytics tools, it's your choice. Typically when people ask us about Tableau, Power, bi, qlikview, Domo, what not, usually we ask why you ask the question. We try to understand where you are and what you have in house as resources to support whatever that you're thinking of. And then we kind of educate you what other options maybe you haven't been considered. And hopefully we can help you choose what the right choice for you. And hopefully with our framework, the data warehousing, the templates professional service, we can help you make BI faster and more empowering for all of you people. So the answer is yes. We support pretty much all these BI tools and the main idea is what you have, where you're going, why and how can we help you. And we usually can, by the way, Data Self, currently we are over 30 people. Most of our team is in the US but we have people in other locations and we're here, we're really here to help you be more successful with, you know, getting data out of your systems. More questions here. With the integration of Acumatica, can you bring the dashboards into Acumatica to view from there? Good question, April. Absolutely, yes. Data Self reports and dashboards can be embedded into other applications like Akumatica, Netsuite, Sage intact as long as your tool, whatever the tool is, can work with JavaScript or iFrame, which nowadays most tools can, then you can take the Data Self reports and dashboards and embed them into application. And once you do that properly, the idea is users will be able to access reports and dashboards from Data Self inside of the application and they might have no clue that that report is not coming from the, you know, let's say Akumatica is. The data is from Akumatica or from other systems, but the user doesn't even know that it's being rendered through a BI solution, not through the Acumatica built in reporting capabilities. And this applies also to other digital systems, not only to Acumatica. As I mentioned now the question are your support staff available to help train and modify reports for someone who is never to these types of systems? For instance, setting up a production meeting report for weekly meetings? So the answer is yes. We have a fairly big professional services department which the main focus is how can we help our clients in VARS as well to be more successful with the IBASE reporting. And that's a question every client has a different need. You know, some clients, they need zero support. We have many clients that they got the Data Self solution with zero support from Data Self and they are running and flying with it. Some of the clients on the other opposite side of the spectrum is they have no bandwidth to do anything DI related and we become their BI team. Most companies fall in between these two extremes. Many companies, they like to be trained. So we love to teach you the fish. The more independent you are, the better. Me personally, I prefer to sell you license and services, but we're here to train you, we're here to help you set up data extraction, massage the data warehouse if you need to bring more systems, customize reports, help end users being business users or business Analysts, we are here to really help mid sized companies become more self sufficient with BI based reporting. So absolutely we have people to do that. Could you tell something about web data security in the cloud, on Amazon web servers and whatnot? So first of all the data self number one company value is data privacy and data security. So we use best practices, we use Azure and AWS as our cloud providers and we use a lot of cybersecurity settings to be sure the data is secured. Companies that actually decide to have their data on premises for whatever the reason, compliance issues or they want to have control fully. As I mentioned we have a lego block approach that we can move all the data self solution behind the firewall. So no matter what your concerns or what you want to do from a cybersecurity standpoint, talk with us. Our first main goal is to educate the options that we're experts in and things we're not experts. We'll point to other vendors that can, you know, answer those questions. We've been around for about 18 years. We only do BI based reporting so we're very experts in lots of data sources, ETL processes, data warehousing, tableau power, BI excel in how to do this in a secure way to help you more successful. So you know, please contact Tom and I so we can discuss your specific requirements and see how we can help. Well with that. Looks like we have tackled the questions. I really hope you have found this webinar informative. I know we just covered the surface of BI based reporting. There's a lot more things behind the scenes of how they work and how they do the magic. Feel free to reach out so we can talk with you and learn your specific questions and how we can help. I hope you have a wonderful successful year end. Remember we have promotions to help you close the budget in case you have and Tom and I here are looking forward to help you be more successful by making more informed decisions anytime and anywhere. Thanks for watching.